-h and --help standards

[Joseph118]

Are there standards for the -h/--help outputs?
If so, what are they?

What I mean is when you input:

PROGRAM -h

into the terminal.

[helios]

Nope. Just copy what other applications do. For example, here's ls --help:

Usage: ls [OPTION]... [FILE]...
List information about the FILEs (the current directory by default).
Sort entries alphabetically if none of -cftuvSUX nor --sort is specified.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
  -a, --all                  do not ignore entries starting with .
  -A, --almost-all           do not list implied . and ..
      --author               with -l, print the author of each file
  -b, --escape               print C-style escapes for nongraphic characters
      --block-size=SIZE      scale sizes by SIZE before printing them; e.g.,
                               '--block-size=M' prints sizes in units of
                               1,048,576 bytes; see SIZE format below
  -B, --ignore-backups       do not list implied entries ending with ~
(etc.)

The SIZE argument is an integer and optional unit (example: 10K is 10*1024).
Units are K,M,G,T,P,E,Z,Y (powers of 1024) or KB,MB,... (powers of 1000).

Using color to distinguish file types is disabled both by default and
with --color=never.  With --color=auto, ls emits color codes only when
standard output is connected to a terminal.  The LS_COLORS environment
variable can change the settings.  Use the dircolors command to set it.

Exit status:
 0  if OK,
 1  if minor problems (e.g., cannot access subdirectory),
 2  if serious trouble (e.g., cannot access command-line argument).

GNU coreutils online help: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
Full documentation at: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/ls>
or available locally via: info '(coreutils) ls invocation'

So, that would be
<Basic usage>
<Brief description of the purpose of the program>
<List of options. Note the formatting>
<Clarifications on some of the options, if necessary>
<Exit statuses, if they give any information>
<Where to get more information>

[Bdanielz]

This as well
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Example-of-Getopt.html#Example-of-Getopt